Book Image

Matplotlib for Python Developers - Second Edition

By : Aldrin Yim, Claire Chung, Allen Yu
Book Image

Matplotlib for Python Developers - Second Edition

By: Aldrin Yim, Claire Chung, Allen Yu

Overview of this book

Python is a general-purpose programming language increasingly being used for data analysis and visualization. Matplotlib is a popular data visualization package in Python used to design effective plots and graphs. This is a practical, hands-on resource to help you visualize data with Python using the Matplotlib library. Matplotlib for Python Developers, Second Edition shows you how to create attractive graphs, charts, and plots using Matplotlib. You will also get a quick introduction to third-party packages, Seaborn, Pandas, Basemap, and Geopandas, and learn how to use them with Matplotlib. After that, you’ll embed and customize your plots in third-party tools such as GTK+3, Qt 5, and wxWidgets. You’ll also be able to tweak the look and feel of your visualization with the help of practical examples provided in this book. Further on, you’ll explore Matplotlib 2.1.x on the web, from a cloud-based platform using third-party packages such as Django. Finally, you will integrate interactive, real-time visualization techniques into your current workflow with the help of practical real-world examples. By the end of this book, you’ll be thoroughly comfortable with using the popular Python data visualization library Matplotlib 2.1.x and leveraging its power to build attractive, insightful, and powerful visualizations.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

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Before we start plotting, we need to import the data we intend to plot and get familiar with basic plotting commands in Matplotlib. Let's start going through these basic commands!

While working on data visualization projects, we need to ensure that we have basic familiarity and understanding of the tools used for data processing. Before we begin, let's briefly revise the most common data structures you will encounter when handling data with Python.

List

This is the most basic Python data structure; it stores a collection of values. While you can store any data type as an element in a Python list, for our purpose of data visualization, we mostly handle lists of numerical values as data input, or at, most, lists with elements of the same data type, such as strings to store text labels.

A list is specified by square brackets, []. To initiate an empty list, assign [] to a variable by l = []. To create a list, we can write the following:

fibonacci = [1,1,2,3,5,8,13]

Sometimes, we may want...